Oblivion
by DocMarten2525
Summary: Nick Valentine talks about his latest case with Ellie, his secretary, in the process reflecting on the vagaries of human nature and his own past. Might be the first in a series, if FFN allowed stories to be arranged in series, which it doesn't, so maybe chapter one but for now, a one-shot.


Nick Valentine let his heavy rucksack slip to the floor as he kicked the door closed behind him. "Honey, I'm home," he called out.

"Nice," his secretary said, looking up from her crossword book. It was a new one scavenged from the ruins of the old Boston Public Library, and she was doing them slowly, trying to make them last as long as possible. Crosswords were her passion and she'd erased and re-done the ones in her old book so many times she could probably do them in her sleep.

Nick laughed, mussing Ellie's hair as he stumped past her desk. "Sorry to interrupt your puzzle, kid," he said. "Miss me?"

Ellie closed the book, marking her place with a pre-War dollar bill she kept specifically for that purpose. "Well? How did it go? Did you find him? You look like hell."

"I feel like hell." Nick hung his holstered .45 on the coat tree next to his desk and sat down stiffly. "Kid's dead, probably has been since the day he lit out. Never found the body, but I took his signet ring and some other stuff off a raider. She was a pretty little thing, too; all doe-eyes and big tits. They were using her as bait. Like coyotes using a bitch in heat to lure out farm dogs." Nick reached into the pocket of his trench coat. "Pretty sure he wasn't her first, either. " He flipped something across the room at Ellie, who caught it reflexively then dropped it with a little shriek as she realized what it was: human ears, dried and twisted, strung on a leather thong.

"Nick! That's disgusting!" She shuddered as she picked the grisly thing gingerly up off the floor to look at it again. "Gross," she said, turning it in her hands. "Who would do something like that?"

"Raiders," the old detective answered shortly.

"Animals."

"Hell, no," Valentine answered. "Animals only kill when they need to. Humans are lower down than that."

"That's not true," she said. "Most people aren't like that. You can't blame us all for the actions of a few"

"Can't I?" The old detective shook his head. "I used to think that. We all did, back in the day. Figured we'd evolved, progressed. Left the bad old days behind. We were wrong. Law, order, morals - they're just a deal we make with ourselves, and they only work as long as we have governments to make the rules and cops and soldiers to enforce them. Take that away and people revert. Caveman days all over again, people beating each other's brains out with rocks."

He paused, his eyes fixed somewhere far away. "After the war, when things started to fall apart, it all came flooding back. The guy in the next cubicle, the kid who delivered your groceries… turns out they were just waiting for the chance to go on a spree. Except for them, we might have made it. Might have made it in spite of the bombs. " He shook his head again. "We never stood a goddamned chance, Ellie. Not a chance. Damned raiders anyway. I'd kill them all, if I could."

Ellie didn't answer. She'd heard it all before. "And the girl?" she asked. "The … bait?"

"I killed her. Felt like a waste – she was a hot little number. Didn't stop me, though."

"I can't imagine it would," she answered drily.

He laughed. "No, I suppose I'm not really wired that way, am I? Good thing, too. " He reached into another pocket and flipped a small, delicately made revolver across the room to his secretary.

She caught it deftly. A snub-nosed .38, built for a woman's hand, with the hammer and front sights filed down so it wouldn't snag on clothing or a purse.

"Pretty," she observed, flipping open the cylinder and checking the action.

"Little present for you," Nick said. "Deadly little thing at close range. Hide it in all sorts of unlikely places, too. Raider thought if she batted her eyelashes just right it'd slow me down enough for her to get it out."

"She didn't recognize what you were?" Ellie asked.

Nick grinned mirthlessly. "It was dark, I guess. Or maybe old habits die hard; I'm sure it worked for her lots of times before. Anyway, she's dead now and most of her crew with her. That's the only good thing to come out of it. Doesn't bring Ricky Copland back to life, though. Good thing I took payment in advance. Speaking of which – " he hauled a bag out of the pocket of his rucksack. It clinked when he set it down. "Loot – cash, some pre-War jewelry, a few other bits and pieces. Take it down to the market and see what you get for it all. Pay the bills, pick up anything we need and keep the rest for yourself. I think it's been a while since you've been paid. "

"Thanks." She took the bag and emptied it out onto the table, deftly counting out the cash – bottle caps, made in the millions by the soda pop factories in the years before the Great War and now the universal medium of exchange in what had once been the city of Boston in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. "Nice haul." She swept the caps into a drawer and marked the totals in a ledger on her desk. "How did the parents take it?" she asked.

"Badly," Valentine grunted. "Blamed me, blamed each other. Lots of swearing and wailing. Their only child. It'd break my heart. If I had one."

"Oh, Nick," Ellie said crossing over to him, "don't be like that." She took his face between her hands and gazed into his shining, yellow eyes. The skin beneath her fingers was cool and strangely soft, and years of hard living had left it battered and torn in spots, revealing the gleaming wires and smooth metal planes of the robotic frame beneath.

A gear whirred softly as the detective's pupils dilated. "Ellie – " he began.

"No, listen to me," she cut him off, a finger to his lips. "You have a bigger 'heart' than most people I know. You put your life on the line, day in and day out for folks in this town. Half the time, you don't even get paid for it."

"Some people don't think a synth's life is worth that much," Nick answered.

"Some people are idiots," she replied. "There isn't a person in Diamond City you haven't touched in some way – a child found, a lover rescued, a wrong righted. The Coplands may have lost their son, but at least now they know what happened to him. Sometimes bad news is better than no news."

"You're a sweet girl, Ellie," Nick told her, shaking her off gently. "I don't know what I'd do without you. Why don't you go on home now? I've got a bit of paperwork to do before I close up. If you get down to the market before it closes you can trade in that junk I brought back. Maybe buy yourself something nice while you're at it."

"Okay, I'll do that," she said. "Thanks, Nick. She smiled at the old detective. "I might go down to the Dugout later on. I think the new barman is sweet on me. Maybe see you there?"

"Not tonight. I need a good recharge. I'll just see you in the morning and you can fill me in on what happened while I was gone. "

"Okay, then. " She put her hand on his shoulder. "Don't be sad, okay? There was nothing you could do."

"I know." He patted her hand awkwardly. "Get out of here now before the market closes."

He sat for a long while after she left. There was a bottle in the desk drawer and he longed for the days when his consciousness wore a human body and oblivion lived in the bottom of a glass. Before the War, before the Institute, when "synthetic" was a kind of oil you put in your car and he was just plain Nick Valentine, a detective in the Boston Police Department.

He took out the bottle anyway and poured himself a drink. It was a waste, of course. His system didn't process alcohol that way. But just for a moment, he wished he was someone, anyone, else. With his good hand – the one that still had skin on it and looked at least passably human – he gripped the locket on its chain around his neck, thought of a girl he had once known, and dreamed of oblivion.

[Author's Note: Some canon divergence here. The human Nick Valentine was with the Chicago PD and was working with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Lasers in Boston on the Eddie Winter case when the war broke out. Nowadays, he generally uses a pipe revolver of some sort, not a .45. And his memory doesn't include the time just after the war. Although the human whose memories he has lived at that time, the Nick we know did not himself experience it, having been created by the Institute many years later, with Nick's memories from before. He could have learned about all those things, of course, but it sounded better to have him reminisce about it. Also, I am working on the assumption that a synth of his generation is mostly robot and would use alcohol as an organic fuel, if at all, rather than as an intoxicant. Similarly, I see him as not having much in the way of human emotions and certainly not the kind that would cause him to be distracted by a pretty girl and her feminine wiles.]


End file.
